An open-armed welcome by the Marines is suspiciously rah-rah, but overall, a polished, engaging story of courage and will.
A remarkable escape story by a young soldier caught in the devastating Congo civil war.
Assisted by screenwriter and playwright Sentell, Missamou recounts his story in layered time periods, moving back from a visit he made to the Congo in 2004 as a U.S. Marine graduate, when he was abruptly arrested and imprisoned for five harrowing days until the U.S. government pressed for his release. The son of a local Lari police officer in Brazzaville, the author came of age during the murderous tribal wars that tore the country apart in the 1990s. Until age eight he lived in the care of his mother, one of his father’s multiple wives, in a small village, then went to live with his father and numerous siblings in Poto-Poto. Missamou learned early on that an enormous gulf separated him and his impoverished friends from the world of the white people, called mundelé, like the family of his best friend and adored girlfriend. He killed a gorilla during his requisite manhood-initiation rites, and agreed to undergo grueling military training to appease his father. Sectarian violence among the three ethnic divisions (the M’Bochis, the Laris and the Niboleks) erupted twice during this time—in 1992, when Missamou and his adolescent friends were formed into makeshift, gun-toting guard units; and in 1997, when he was able to bring to safety his family and some wealthy white settlers, who in turn bought his plane tickets out of the country. Missamou and Sentell create a stylish, suspenseful narrative that does not spare graphic details. The author’s escape from the country and ability to hoodwink passport officials from Switzerland to the United States constituted a near miracle, and his first scenes of Paris and Sacramento are both funny and moving.
An open-armed welcome by the Marines is suspiciously rah-rah, but overall, a polished, engaging story of courage and will.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-1629-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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